The Jim Crow era was marked by strict racial segregation, severely limiting Black individuals’ mobility and dignity. Public leisure spaces were often segregated, making travel dangerous and humiliating for Black people, which affected their leisure habits and options. Picturing Mobility: Black Tourism and Leisure During the Jim Crow Era, an exhibition curated by Elizabeth Patton, chair and associate professor of media and communication studies, is on view through December 19 at UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.

The new exhibit, curated with organizational support from Beth Saunders and Emily Cullen ’06, with exhibition design by Tony Venne and Cullen, highlights how ordinary people captured moments from their personal lives.

These images depict mobility through scenes of relaxation, happiness, amusement, and community, challenging the dominant narrative of Black life during Jim Crow as primarily defined by restrictions and struggle. This exhibition emphasizes the power of these images to affirm Black humanity and provide meaningful insights into life fully lived despite the oppressive system of segregation.

Picturing Mobility invites viewers to explore what it meant for Black Americans to seek joy, rest, and travel amid a world shaped by exclusion and segregation. It draws on photographs, oral histories, audio, video, and travel ephemera related to Black tourism and leisure activities, mainly from the mid-Atlantic region, from the 1920s to the 1960s. The artifacts show how documenting and taking part in leisure and mobility were powerful forms of resistance.

Patton’s current book project, Documenting Black Leisure as a Form of Resistance, examines the history of Black leisure and tourism in the U.S. through Jim Crow-era media. The AOK Library Gallery will host an opening reception and curatorial talk with Patton on September 19 from 5 to 7 p.m.

The presentation of this exhibition and its public programs is supported by the Arts+ Initiative; the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; and an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, as well as individual contributors.

UMBC Special Collections has been given an extraordinary gift of one of the world’s largest collections devoted to parapsychology, from the Parapsychology Foundation, Inc. in Greenport, New York. The acquisition will be known as the Eileen J. Garrett Parapsychology Foundation Collection. It includes documents related to hauntings, poltergeists, out-of-body experiences, and séances, as well as spirit photographs and much more.

A renowned resource

The Eileen J. Garrett Parapsychology Foundation Collection contains more than 12,000 volumes and more than 100 periodicals, including rare books on and early journals devoted to psychical research. The collection emphasizes the literature of contemporary parapsychology and those publications that approach the subject from objective and analytical points of view.

The library also maintains strong sections on the history of psychical research and parapsychology, including early Spiritualism, mysticism and relevant philosophical works, as well as on mediumship, apparitions, hauntings, poltergeists, near-death and out-of-body experiences, experimental research on extrasensory perception, psychokinesis and precognition. A number of relevant encyclopedias, doctoral dissertations on parapsychological topics, introductory textbooks, and biographies of researchers, psychics and mediums are also on hand.

The archival collections comprise the history and proceedings of the Parapsychology Foundation and its annual conferences and publications, as well as field work, research notes, and manuscripts from prominent parapsychologists. Among the people and topics included in the collection are: the Bindelof séance phenomena, research files of psychic researcher Hereward Carrington, the poltergeist investigations and personal scrapbook of Nandor Fodor, scrapbooks compiled by Eileen J. Garrett, records pertaining to the R101 Airship crash, and spirit recordings captured by Hans Holzer.

The collection features original manuscripts by Harry Price and others pertaining to the infamous Borley Rectory case, popularly known as the most haunted house in England. It also contains Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner’s dream telepathy research and many other subjects. Audio visual materials include over 600 audio and video recordings of conferences and lectures, spirit photographs, glass slides, target images, psychokinetic objects, and an ESP testing machine.

The Parapsychology Foundation’s rich history

The non-profit Parapsychology Foundation provides a worldwide forum supporting the scientific investigation of psychic phenomena. The Foundation gives grants; publishes pamphlets, monographs, conference proceedings, and the International Journal of Parapsychology; hosts the Perspectives Lecture Series; conducts an outreach program; and publishes books on the subject through its imprint, Helix Press.

The Parapsychology Foundation was founded by trance medium and research advocate Eileen J. Garrett and congresswoman Hon. Frances P. Bolton in 1951 to encourage and support impartial scientific inquiry into psychical aspects of human nature such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis.

A participant in some of the groundbreaking psychic experiments of the 1920s and 1930s, Garrett understood that psychical research was ignored by a large segment of the academic community. She knew that practical aid for scholars and scientists working in this area, now known as parapsychology, would not be available from most universities nor from other foundations. The Parapsychology Foundation, as envisioned by Garrett, fulfilled this need by providing a worldwide forum for the support of scientific exploration of psychic phenomena.

Establishing a new home for the collection

The Foundation recently decided to transfer its library to an American institution that would be willing to care for, interpret, and provide public access to the Foundation’s collection of scholarly materials. UMBC Special Collections was awarded this major gift thanks to its demonstrated commitment to preservation and accessibility.

Parapsychology Foundation president Lisette Coly states, “While bittersweet to relinquish the care of our library into the most capable hands of UMBC Special Collections, we are confident and excited that it has found a perfect harbor for its continuation and growth. Lovingly maintained throughout our 72 years of existence, we are assured of its preservation and growth as a valued resource disseminating quality information concerning a complex and often misunderstood subject. We eagerly look forward to future collaboration.”

“We are thrilled to bring this important collection to UMBC,” says curator and head of UMBC Special Collections Beth Saunders. “I believe that the Garrett Collection is exemplary of the spirit of free intellectual inquiry that our materials are intended to support.”

Saunders notes, “The collection includes materials relevant to a wide range of academic disciplines including anthropology, art history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and physics, and addresses fundamental concerns of human experience.”

Building on strengths

“The Garrett Library also builds upon an existing strength of Special Collections,” adds Saunders. “We are known internationally for our Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios and Thoughtographic Photography.”

Jule Eisenbud was heavily involved with psychoanalysis and psychology and was a clinical faculty member at the University of Colorado, and an honored member of the American Society for Psychical Research and Parapsychology Foundation. Eisenbud met his main subject, Ted Serios, in 1964 in Chicago. At the time, Serios was an unemployed bellhop who claimed that he had the ability to put images on film with his mind. Although initially skeptical of Serios, a significant number of successful experiments under tightly controlled conditions convinced Eisenbud that Serios’s talent was legitimate.

Ted Serios’s ability, which came to be known as “thoughtography,” gained national attention with his appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. The Eisenbud Collection includes over 2,000 photographs and is the subject of a forthcoming exhibition organized by Emily Cullen, curator of exhibitions at UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery, for The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a book to be published by Atelier Éditions, both in 2023.

Saunders envisions similar opportunities for the Eileen J. Garrett Parapsychology Foundation Collection. “We plan to focus first on making the collection accessible by cataloging the books and serials and creating a Finding Aid for the archival documents. We also plan to publish detailed research guides to aid scholars in discovery of relevant materials. In the future, there are a number of digitization projects that would make the highest research value materials more widely available, and I’d like to work with students to curate an exhibition from the collection in the Library Gallery.”

UMBC’s Special Collections

The Special Collections department collects materials of enduring historical and cultural value—housing, preserving, and making accessible materials that are original, rare, unique, fragile, and archival. The collections and staff support UMBC’s research and educational mission and its dedication to cultural and ethnic diversity, social responsibility, and lifelong learning. Topical collecting areas are particularly emphasized within the fields of photography, the history of the biological sciences, the Baltimore Sun newspaper, science fiction literature and popular culture, parapsychology, alternative presses, UMBC history and records, and Maryland manuscript, photograph, and newspaper collections.

Saunders notes that Special Collections will continue to work with the Parapsychology Foundation to grow the collections and encourage its scholarly use. The Parapsychology Foundation hopes to administer library grants that will fund researchers visiting the Garrett Collection at UMBC. The organizations would also like to host joint public programs and academic symposia on topics related to the collection in the future.

UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery presents the work of Baltimore artist Antonio McAfee in the exhibition Antonio McAfee: Through the Layers, Pt. 2, now through March 13.

Since 2011, Antonio McAfee has been making work influenced by historical portraiture of African Americans in the The Exhibition of American Negroes. Organized for the 1900 Paris World Exposition by W.E.B. Du Bois, the display functioned as a legislative, economic, and photographic survey of middle-class African Americans living in Georgia from 1850–1899. This ‘counter archive’ challenged racist assumptions steeped in pseudo-science, presenting proof of the vitality and upward social mobility of southern blacks. 

Beth Saunders, curator and head of UMBC’s Special Collection and Gallery, noted that “McAfee’s persistent archival impulse led us to invite him to work with historical photographs in Special Collections.” Once on-site, McAfee engaged primarily with the Rooks Collection of African and African American Photographs, named for Ronald Rooks, a Baltimore art dealer who donated the earliest accessions.

In an interview with curator Emily Hauver for the exhibition catalog, McAfee, a photographer raised and based in Baltimore, said that working with the Rooks Collection expanded the context of understanding the period of 1850-1900: “The assortment of vernacular photography made during and after the Civil War in the Rooks Collection is a resource for accessing the intimate and public lives of African Americans of the Civil War period.” He also relayed that the variety of processes represented in the collection including daguerreotypes, hand-painted tintypes, albumen silver prints, cabinet cards, and gelatin silver prints also triggered more experimentation in his own work with the images. “(Seeing) the markings and strokes on some of the prints in this collection, I have been inspired to incorporate more mark making in my new work.”

Antonio McAfee, The Magician, 2019. Pigment print, 3D image with 3D glasses. © Antonio McAfee, Courtesy of the Artist

Antonio McAfee, Robert Smalls, 2019. Pigment print, 3D image with 3D glasses. © Antonio McAfee, Courtesy of the Artist 

Antonio McAfee, The Gem, 2019. Pigment print, 3D image with 3D glasses.  © Antonio McAfee, Courtesy of the Artist

Antonio McAfee, Third (3), 2019. Pigment print, 3D image with 3D glasses. © Antonio McAfee, Courtesy of the Artist 

Antonio McAfee, Young Man and Dog, 2019. Pigment print, 3D image with 3D glasses.  © Antonio McAfee, Courtesy of the Artist

* * * * *

A public program with reception to follow is free and open to the public on Thursday, February 27, at 5 p.m.: Art, Race, and the Archive: Antonio McAfee in Conversation with Shawn Michelle Smith

Header Image: Installation view of Antonio McAfee: Through the Layers, Pt. 2. Exhibition, photo by Marlayna Demond ‘11 for UMBC

Curator, educator, and photohistorian Beth Saunders has joined UMBC as the new curator and head of special collections and the gallery at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery. She will oversee the management, preservation, and exhibition of UMBC’s photography, rare book, and archival collections.

“I’m really looking forward to working with and promoting UMBC’s Special Collections, and hope to increase engagement among students as well as the local Baltimore and wider scholarly communities,” says Saunders.

“One of the things that excites me about Special Collections is that it’s a nerdy collection in the best possible way, bridging the sciences, the humanities, the arts, and other fields of research,” she adds. “We have rare books on the occult and paranormal psychology, a science fiction research collection, and a huge number of comic books. Nerd culture is now mainstream culture, which is an interesting turn. Here at UMBC, we have an archaeology of that history.”

Holdings in Special Collections at UMBC include the fields of photography, the history of the biological sciences, the Baltimore Sun newspaper, science fiction literature and popular culture, alternative presses, UMBC history and records, and Maryland manuscript, photograph, and newspaper collections. Of particular strength, the Photography Collections were established in the early 1970s, propelled by the purchase of over 5,000 photographs by pioneering social documentary photographer Lewis Hine. Since then, the collection grew under the supervision of former curator Tom Beck, who retired in 2017, to encompass some 2 million photographs.

“The photography collections are really a treasure trove,” says Saunders. “I can’t think of another university collection with the depth and breadth of UMBC’s; it is truly remarkable.”

A photohistorian’s eye

Saunders will also bring her scholarly and curatorial training to the direction of the Library Gallery, which presents two to three exhibitions per year drawn from objects in Special Collections as well as shows originated by other institutions.

“In thinking about exhibition programming for the Library Gallery, I want to put our collections front and center,” Saunders says. “I’m interested in ways that we can bring together diverse types of materials from Special Collections — from photographs to science fiction fanzines to fifteenth-century scientific treatises — to tell new stories or to reconsider familiar objects or images in a new light.”

Saunders continues, “As a photohistorian, I’m interested in the intersection of art and technology and in the social function of photographs, both historically and in our present time. I also want to raise the profile of our collections by partnering with contemporary artists and by traveling our shows to other institutions.”

Saunders comes to UMBC from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was assistant curator in the Department of Photographs. While there from 2013 to 2018, she curated the exhibitions Quicksilver Brilliance: Adolf de Meyer Photographs (2017) and Paradise of Exiles: Early Photography in Italy (2017). She co-curated Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video (2016), Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play (2016), Grand Illusions: Staged Photography from the Met Collection (2015), and Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklánski Selects from the Met Collection (2015). She also assisted on major traveling shows including Irving Penn: Centennial (2017) and Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs (2017).

A specialist in the history of photography, Saunders earned a Ph.D. in art history from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2016. She has received numerous awards in support of her research, including the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Joan and Stanford Alexander Award from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Her writing on the history of photography has appeared in journals, edited volumes, and catalogs. Most recently, she published an essay on the artist Sarah Charlesworth’s Modern History series in the exhibition catalog for Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy (The Met, 2018). Saunders has also taught art history at Baruch College, Rhode Island College, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Welcome reception

The campus community is invited to a reception on November 14, in the Library Gallery, to welcome Beth Saunders and to celebrate the current exhibition in the gallery, Depth of Field: Acquisitions to the Photography Collections, 2008 – 2018. The exhibition will remain on display through December 19. More information on Depth of Field is available on UMBC’s Arts and Culture Calendar.

Featured image: Beth Saunders in UMBC’s archival collections. Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

On Wednesday, August 29, the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery launches UMBC’s Fall 2018 arts season with the exhibition Depth of Field, presenting approximately one hundred images acquired over the last ten years by UMBC’s Photography Collections through gifts from donors and artists. The photographs on view highlight the breadth and depth of the collection and illustrate the range of forms, technology, and artists that historically shaped the medium and are presently impacting its ongoing evolution.

Featured artists in the exhibition include Albert Arthur Allen, Laurie Brown, Kristin Capp, Clarence Carvell BFA ’93, Chim (David Seymour), William Eggleston, Donna Ferrato, Robert Fichter, Todd Forsgren, Peggy Fox, Sally Gall, Ralph Gibson, Penny Harris, Sam Holden, Irina Ionesco, Walter Iooss, Lotte Jacobi, N. Jay Jaffee, Brian Jones, Nate Larson, David S. Lavine, Alen MacWeeney, Mary Ellen Mark, Fred McDarrah, Dorothy Norman, David Seltzer, Steve Szabo, Barbara Traub, Peter Turnley, and Robert VonSternberg. Additionally, the exhibition features daguerreotypes, painted photographs, and post-mortem photographs. Depth of Fieldis curated by Emily Hauver, who is curator of exhibition for the gallery.

The Photography Collections at UMBC contain more than two million photographs, with an emphasis on the formats, processes, genres, and technological evolution of the medium and images demonstrating the social impact of photography. Works include photography that has influenced public thought or legislation such as Lewis Hine’s photographs of child labor and the mining photographs (1870–1895) of George Bretz. These photographs have been used by scholars from around the world and have been loaned to venerable institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.

Collection holdings also illustrate the development of the aesthetic principles of photography. Works by Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, A. Aubrey Bodine, Bill Brandt, Eileen Cowin, Barbara Crane, Judy Dater, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Roland Freeman, Lotte Jacobi, Alfred Cheney Johnston, Stephen Marc, David Plowden, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Walter Rosenblum, Jaromir Stephany (professor of visual arts, deceased), Steve Szabo, James Van Der Zee, Edward Weston, Minor White, members of the Photo-Secession, and hundreds of other artists are represented.

Also noteworthy are the hundreds of thousands of newspaper and wire service photographs from the Baltimore Sun and Underwood & Underwood. These photographs, along with other images held such as panoramic views of Maryland by the Hughes Company, constitute a great resource for study of Maryland history.

The collections are supported by extensive holdings of books, apparatuses, and ephemera spanning the entire history of photography from 1839 to the present. Over 8,000 individual pieces of equipment reveal the progression of the technology of the photographic medium. The archival holdings in photography provide researchers with rich resources to further study a particular artist, including the papers of Jim Amos, Mildred Grossman, and Jaromir Stephany.

Related to the Photography Collections is the Edward L. Bafford Photographic Book Collection, a holding of about 40,000 volumes. The book collection ranges from the announcement of the invention of the daguerreotype in the Comptes rendu hebdomdaires des séances de l’Academie des sciences (1839), to the Decisive Moment (1950), and Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004). More information about the Photography Collections can be found here.

Many of the images in Depth of Field were gifts from the artists. Additional contributions were made by John Belling; Abigail Bialer; Stephen Bilkis; Stanley Burns; Sara Cleary-Burns; Mark Connelly; Alice Dana; Joseph D’Angelo; Kevin Debbs; Kathleen Ewing; Margery Fisher; Timothy Grell; Paula Hackeling; Jerry Harlowe; Stockton Todd Holden, Mina Horn, and Donna Sherman; Mark Jaffe; Faustine Jones-Wilson; Marina Kirshenbaum; Louis Klaitman; Elizabeth Krueger; Amy Loeserman; Ron Sadi; Sonia and Rahul Shah; Bill Shneiderman; Lee Skolnick; Sean Sullivan; Matthew E. Trevenen; Michael Trevenen; Joseph Triolo; Sean Westley; and Michael Woodhouse.

The exhibition will continue on display through December 19. The Library Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with extended hours on Thursday until 8 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free. Additional information about the exhibition can be found here.

Images: (1) Todd Forsgren, Adelaide’s Warbler (Setophaga adelaidae), 2009 (detail), from the series Ornithological Photographs, Inkjet print, Accession no. P2016-07-001, gift of the artist. (2)  N. Jay Jaffee, Woman and Young Girl in Subway, 1951, Gelatin silver print, selenium toned, Accession no. P2012-17-012, gift of Paula Hackeling. (3) Lotte Jacobi, Marlene Dietrich, 1929, Platinum print, Accession no. P2013-31-014, gift of Louis Klaitman.

The UMBC Dresher Center for the Humanities will host its first Humanities Teaching Lab (HT Lab) on February 14, as part of UMBC’s new Inclusion Imperative program, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Humanities Teaching Lab: Frederick Douglass Day will commemorate Frederick Douglass’s 200th birthday and Black History Month through a public reading of excerpts from four of his speeches, birthday party, and transcribe-a-thon at the UMBC Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery from noon until 2:00 p.m.

“The Dresher Center is thrilled to join forces with the Colored Conventions project at the University of Delaware and the Smithsonian Transcription Center at the National Museum of African American History and Culture to celebrate Frederick Douglass Day at UMBC through the first Inclusion Imperative Humanities Teaching Lab,” says Jessica Berman, director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities. “The transcribe-a-thon shows how innovative digital work in the humanities can help us explore and extend the legacies of Fredrick Douglass and other unsung social justice heroes.”

HT Labs aim to give humanities educators and researchers hands-on exposure to new media tools and methods to teach and learn about the humanities. During the Douglass Day event, participants will join Howard University, Princeton University, and 35 additional universities and colleges nationwide to transcribe two million digitized document from the Freedmen’s Bureau papers. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was created in 1865 by President Lincoln to administer food, clothing, healthcare, and access to legal services; to assist African American soldiers and sailors in securing back pay, enlistment bounties, and pensions; to promote a system of labor contracts to replace slavery; to promote education; and to protect freedmen and women from intimidation and assault, among other purposes.

Courtney C. Hobson, Dresher Center coordinator and lead organizer of the HT Lab: Frederick Douglass Day notes that crowdsourcing the digital transcription of the Freedmen’s Bureau papers is a way to rapidly expand access to the papers for students, scholars, and African American family historians across the nation and the world. “The transcribe-a-thon adds to the existing digital database of typewritten copies of original records from the post-Civil War era that might otherwise have gone unused due to the quantity and length of time it takes to read handwritten material,” she explains.

Frederick Douglass Day events date back to the time of Frederick Douglass’s death in 1895. The Colored Conventions digital history initiative was founded to share, with a new generation of students and scholars, the history of the Colored Conventions which began in 1830 in Philadelphia as a meeting by the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Bishop Richard Allen. For sixty years Black women and men came together in state, regional, and national conventions to organize around education, labor, and legal justice through the Civil War and post-war period. In 2017, the project formally reestablished Fredrick Douglass Day by organizing a national, crowdsourced effort to transcribe Convention Minutes.

“Crowdsourced transcription projects like the Frederick Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon are great ways to bring digital humanities to different audiences,” says Anne Sarah Rubin, associate director of the Imaging Resource Center (IRC) and history professor, who will be teaching faculty how to use crowdsourcing techniques in the classroom. “When students and members of the general public contribute to a project like this, they feel a sense of scholarly connection and ownership that results in deeper engagement with the materials.”

In addition to the transcribe-a-thon, the HT Lab will include a public reading of excerpts from three of Frederick Douglass’s speeches: “On Women’s Suffrage,” “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” and “The meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” as well as “The Color Line,” an article he wrote. Faculty and staff readers will include Courtney Hobson; Scott Casper, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; Derek Musgrove ’97, history; and Joby Taylor ’05, Ph.D., LLC, director of the Peaceworker program. A discussion will follow between faculty, staff, and students about the importance of reading and understanding Fredrick Douglass’s work in the civil rights movement to actively engage in inclusive scholarship that furthers equity, education, and social justice today.

“As a pioneer in the struggle for freedom and equality and an extraordinary writer, Frederick Douglass remains among the most inspiring, powerful leaders in American history,” reflects Scott Casper. “All of us can learn from his actions, words, and example in striving for social justice and inclusive excellence.”

UMBC community members interested in the Humanities Teaching Lab: Frederick Douglass Day can register through the Dresher Center for the Humanities.

Banner image by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Legends of Excellence Awards Brunch, sponsored by the Chapter of Black and Latino Alumni every five years, recently honored four awardees who have played instrumental roles in the success of UMBC’s African American and Latino students. Recipients and nominators alike spoke about the supportive community that is UMBC, and how their time on campus transformed their lives.

“We consider the award winners legends because of the indelible marks they have made on UMBC’s African American and Latino students over the past 50 years,” shared Tamara Lewis ’92, psychology, and event co-chair. The work these legends did to support minority students “made a positive difference, and our students not only survived, but thrived,” added Cynthia Hill, former associate provost for student support services.

Stanyell Odom, director of alumni relations, helped organize the event. “The legends represent grit and greatness,” she shared, “and it is wonderful to have so many alumni come back to campus to recognize the extraordinary impact they’ve made in the lives of hundreds and thousands of fellow Retrievers.”

The first legend honored this year, Simmona Simmons ’74, American studies, started work at the Albin O. Kuhn Library as UMBC opened its doors in 1966 and has served in many roles within the library since then. She is currently the service and special projects librarian and the library liaison to the Africana studies department.

“I always loved working with students,” Simmons shared, “as they discover new information and mature, it is exciting to contribute a small part to their success.” As the only library staff member of color in UMBC’s early days, she made a lasting impact on the first generation of diverse UMBC students.

Jessica Contreras ’98, social work, thanked the next honoree, Rev. Jamie Washington, for his positive influence. “Dr. Washington’s personality and leadership gave me the guidance I needed to explore and learn what it means to be a leader,” Contreras shared. “From him, I learned how to make authentic and meaningful connections with people from all walks of life.”

Washington served in a variety of roles in Residential Life and Student Affairs at UMBC between 1986 and 2002, before shifting his focus to the ministry. He is currently CEO of Washington Consulting Group, named one of the top 10 global diversity consulting groups in the world in 2015; co-pastor of Unity Fellowship Church of Baltimore; and president and co-founder of the Social Justice Training institute.

Still, Washington manages to stay connected to campus by working with the Meyerhoff Summer Bridge Program and Residential and Student Life.  “While I have left UMBC, UMBC has not left me,” he shared. “It will be permanently in my spirit and my energy.”

Earnestine Baker is the “mother of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program,” according to Maceo Thomas ’93, M1, biochemistry and molecular biology. He adds, “Many African Americans succeeded because she did not give up, no matter our circumstances or where we came from.”

Baker served as the first director of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, and was promoted to executive director in 2002, a position she held until her retirement in 2013. Along the way, she had a major impact on hundreds of students. And yet, Baker remains unfailingly humble.

“The thought that I am receiving this Legends honor today exemplifies my belief that when we achieve, it is usually because others helped us. So this is bigger than me,” she reflects. “It is about the more than 1,000 Meyerhoff Scholars whose lives touched mine, from the M1s who believed and validated the vision, to the M28s who are making their mark, carrying forth the legacy.”

Willie Lamousé-Smith, professor emeritus and former chair of Africana studies, arrived at UMBC in 1975. Some of his fondest memories involve standing with students as they demonstrated for racial equality. “UMBC would not be what it is today but for them,” he says.

Since his arrival on campus, Lamousé-Smith’s devotion to students in all areas of life, from academics, to finances, to health, has made a positive difference for hundreds of Retrievers. “The premier duty of educators—and parents, too—is to draw out and cultivate the talents encased in each student, within a nurturing and empathic environment,” he shares.

In his remarks, President Freeman Hrabowski commented that “many of you in this room began at UMBC and made a difference when the country was still trying to figure out if people of all races should come together, with all students of all types having a fair chance to succeed.” Today, Hrabowski says, “Everybody looks to UMBC to ask ‘How do you go about taking people from all kinds of backgrounds, and elevating them, and empowering them to be the very best?’”

The Legends of Excellence awardees are a big part of the answer to that question, along with so many other UMBC community members committed to the success of all students. Like the awardees, Hrabowski said, “We’re here because we celebrate the idea of inclusiveness.”

Banner image: Earnestine Baker (center, in gold) with nominator Maceo Thomas ’93 (left), Pres. Hrabowski (right), and Meyerhoff Scholars Program alumni.

All photos by Jay Baker for UMBC.

The UMBC community welcomed U.S. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden to campus on April 13, 2017 for a conversation on her new role heading the oldest federal cultural institution in the nation. Hayden focused her National Library Week talk on a major issue in the library world, and for the Library of Congress in particular: expanding digital access to the country’s unparalleled collections, “a treasure chest just waiting to be opened.”

The lecture was a homecoming for Hayden, former director of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, who spoke of her longtime friendship with UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski. But before Hayden took the stage, Jessica Berman, director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, shared a powerful personal reflection on the impact of public libraries.

“I wouldn’t be where I am today without librarians,” said Berman. She described how it was a public library that opened doors previously unimaginable for her family, particularly her mother, who grew up in a low-income family in New York.

“My mother’s eyes still tear up when she describes receiving her first library card. It was a talisman,” Berman shared. Her mother went on to receive an undergraduate degree from Smith College and, years later, her doctorate in social work, the same year Berman earned her own Ph.D.

As a young academic, said Berman, “When I first moved to Washington D.C., the Library of Congress was my intellectual life.” She described the rush she felt sitting in the Jefferson Reading Room for the first time and how she still gets the same feeling when she steps into that space 25 years later.

It was with a “personal passion and gratitude for all she has done and all she represents,” that Berman welcomed Hayden to UMBC’s Linehan Concert Hall to present UMBC’s 2017 Daphne Harrison Lecture.

Hayden began by sharing how she made the difficult decision to leave the Pratt library to head the Library of Congress.

For years, Hayden focused her attention on cultivating Baltimore libraries as community spaces and community resources. During the 2015 unrest in Baltimore, she reflected, “the public library was the lifeline for so many people.” She had concerns about “moving from a library that was connecting to people every day” in such an essential way, to serving as the leader of a national institution — broadly impactful, but perhaps less closely connected with city residents’ everyday lives.

Hayden recounted meeting with then-President Barack Obama before her nomination. Together, at the Library of Congress, they viewed personal letters that Rosa Parks wrote after her arrest in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat. Looking at the letters, Obama spoke with Hayden about the immense potential of historical records to directly inform, affirm, and inspire people across the nation. What was needed, he expressed, was someone to bring the library’s 160 million items directly to the public.

Once she formally stepped into her new role, Carla Hayden resolved to open the “treasure chest,” as she describes the Library of Congress, for all the nation to see. Through her own @LbnofCongress Twitter account, she says, “I invited everyone to discover with me” the collections’ riches. After all, Hayden noted, “This wonderful treasure chest is just a mausoleum if people can’t read and see [what’s inside].”

So great are the library’s treasures that Hayden still regularly comes across collections that astound her and excite colleagues who have worked at the library for decades. Many know about the draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting and Abraham Lincoln’s draft of the Gettysburg Address. Fewer people know about the personal correspondence between Jackie Robinson and scout Branch Rickey or the letters Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein wrote to one another.

“The biggest surprise is how much is there that even people who have worked there [for years] don’t know [exists],” she says. “It’s just there…waiting to be opened,” in room after room, across hundreds of miles of shelves.

It’s these discoveries that affirm for her, every day, that digital access isn’t an add-on, it’s a core part of her mission, and that of the library itself.

“This is America’s library. This is your library,” Hayden shared. “We want to be part of people’s lives.”

Carla Hayden’s 2017 Daphne Harrison Lecture, which took place during National Library Week, was sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities, Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery, Africana studies department, and English department.

Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

A recent gift by Stanley B. Burns, M.D. substantially increases the holdings of daguerreotypes at UMBC. Dr. Burns, historian, collector, and physician, donated 252 daguerreotypes from his large photography collection, continuing his long relationship with UMBC.

Tom Beck, chief curator of UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library notes that the donated works are both signed and unsigned daguerreotypes:

More than seventy different photographers are represented among the signed works, including recognized daguerreotypists such as Charles Deforest Fredericks, Rufus Anson, John Plumbe, Jr., Samuel Broadbent, and Jessie Whitehurst. The unsigned works are unattributable to any specific artist but hold significant value for the uniqueness of the imagery, the interesting representations of nineteenth century people, and the material culture characteristics.

Having acquired his first photograph in 1975 (a medical image), Burns founded the “Burns Archive” in 1977 at his New York City home. The Archive began receiving recognition in 1978 by such prominent publications as New York magazine, Aperture magazine, and the New York Times. Art& Antiques Magazine labeled Burns “one of America’s Top 100 Collectors.”

As an historian, Burns has written over 1,100 articles and over forty books on subjects ranging from Victorian funeral portraits to early oncology. His books Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography In America, and Forgotten Marriage: The Painted Tintype & The Decorative Frame, 1860-1910, A Lost Chapter in American Portraiture both received American Photographic Historical Society awards for best publications, and Sleeping Beauty was praised by Pulitzer Prize winning author John Updike in American Heritage magazine. Images from the Burns Archive have been utilized for such nationally and internationally distributed television programs and motion pictures as The American Experience, Hannibal, The Knick, and Silence of the Lambs. 

Images: Header image is UMBC Library, by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. Daguerreotype is “Sea Captain in Typical Distinguished Pose,” by J. H. Young, 1850s. Photography Collections, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery.

Opening on January 30 and continuing until March 26, the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery will present Altered State: Painting Myanmar in a Time of Transition, an exhibition of paintings by 36 contemporary artists from Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation formerly known as Burma.

Created following the transition period of 2011, when a military-backed civilian government replaced oppressive rule by military junta and the country once famous for its seclusion re-entered the world stage, the paintings illustrate current artistic practice in Myanmar and present a series of creative viewpoints on a rapidly changing society. Paintings included in Altered State: Painting Myanmar in a Time of Transition are from the collection of contemporary Myanmar paintings of Ian Holliday, vice president and pro-vice-chancellor (teaching and learning) at the University of Hong Kong.

“The exhibition is important because it highlights the work of a large group of contemporary artists from Myanmar (Burma), many of whom experienced censorship of their work in the past. Myanmar is a country that is gradually transitioning from a long postwar history of military rule to a more democratic form of government,” says Constantine Vaporis, founding director of the Asian Studies Program and professor of history. “Barack Obama was the first U.S. president to visit the country, and his efforts to promote the peaceful democratic transformation of the country were important to the U.S.’s strategic rebalance to Asia.”

On February 1 at 4 p.m., the Humanities Forum and Social Sciences Forum will present a lecture by Christina Fink, professor of the practice in international affairs at The George Washington University, who will speak on “Myanmar: Perspectives on a Society in Transition.”

Professor Fink is a cultural anthropologist who has combined teaching, research, and development work throughout her career. Her areas of expertise are Burma/Myanmar in particular and Southeast Asia more broadly, equitable development, gender and development, civil society in ethnically diverse states. She received her B.A. in international relations from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in social/cultural anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. She has taught at the Elliot School for International Affairs at George Washington University since 2011. She served as a visiting lecturer at the Pacific and Asian studies department at the University of Victoria in 1995, and, from 2001 to 2010, she was a lecturer and program associate at the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute in Thailand.

Presentation of the exhibition at UMBC is supported in part by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Friends of the Library & Gallery, the Libby Kuhn Endowment, and individual contributions. Professor Fink’s lecture is sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, the Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery, the Global Studies Program, the Department of Visual Arts, and the Social Sciences Forum.

Exhibition hours will be 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, with extended hours on Thursday until 8 p.m., and on Saturday and Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. Admission to both the exhibition and lecture is free. Complete information is available on the UMBC Arts & Culture calendar here (exhibition) and here (lecture).